San Diegans search for secrets of the deep

Richard Branson, co-founder of Virgin Oceanic, walks in front of the Challenger sub that he and co-founder Chris Welsh plan to take to the ocean's deepest spots in the name of science and adventure.
— Courtesy of Virgin Oceanic

Richard Branson, co-founder of Virgin Oceanic, walks in front of the Challenger sub that he and co-founder Chris Welsh plan to take to the ocean's deepest spots in the name of science and adventure.
/ Courtesy of Virgin Oceanic

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More than 50 years after the only successful attempt to reach the deepest known spot in the world’s oceans, a few marine experts in San Diego are part of a team that’s angling to make history again.

Under the banner of Virgin Oceanic, they want to reveal secrets of the “last frontier of our own planet,” boost sea science and potentially expand underwater tourism.

Instead of dropping to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in an old-school submersible, the plan is for a solo explorer to “fly” through inky waters roughly seven miles below the surface inside a vehicle that looks like an underwater plane.

It’s the kind of daring that works only if everything goes right; there’s no rescue for someone that far down.

Virgin Oceanic plans to test the Challenger sub in a tank in San Francisco this week, then conduct shallow-water maneuvers near Newport Beach and high-pressure testing in a specially designed chamber later this year. The sub is made of 8,000 pounds of titanium and carbon fiber, crafted to withstand pressures at the sea floor that Virgin compares with 8,000 elephants standing on a Mini Cooper.

If the estimated $15 million project goes off, it will give researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography inLa Jolla and elsewhere an unprecedented peek into the least accessible waters on Earth. “It’s just going to be an incredible resource for looking at life in this extreme environment,” said Doug Bartlett, a marine microbe expert at Scripps, which is part of UC San Diego.

Bartlett plans to use remotely operated “landers” for collecting water, sediment and life-forms from the trench in conjunction with Challenger dives.

He and other scientists will look at everything from the geology and chemistry of the area to the types of simple organisms that survive in extreme environments — the kinds of things that might hold clues to all sorts of biological riddles.

The Challenger idea sprouted years ago when the late adventurer Steve Fossett was setting sailing records in his 125-foot catamaran PlayStation. “He was dreaming about what to do next,” said Eddie Kisfaludy, Virgin Oceanic’s operations manager based in San Diego. “It was having this sub built to go down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.”

The trench includes the deepest spot on Earth, Challenger Deep, created by one tectonic plate plunging beneath another. In 1960, Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard and Navy Lt. Donald Walsh set a record by diving nearly 36,000 feet at that spot in the Navy’s Trieste bathyscaphe and spending about 20 minutes there. It’s an unmatched achievement — and one with San Diego ties. Walsh was based here at the time and the submersible was tested at local Navy facilities before its historic dive.

Fossett eventually turned PlayStation into a platform for undersea exploration by adding a center deck with a crane that could lift a sub out of the water and into a cradle. He also commissioned work on a deep-sea sub but died in 2007 without realizing his dream. His catamaran and the unfinished sub were purchased by Newport Beach native Chris Welsh, an avid yachtsman who shared Fossett’s passion for the adventure.